


Heaven's Ashes

by stellar_dust



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Community: xf_drabble, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-08-05
Updated: 2004-08-05
Packaged: 2017-10-07 02:49:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/60623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellar_dust/pseuds/stellar_dust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mulder and Scully don't make it out of the ship in Fight the Future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heaven's Ashes

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the AlternateUniverses challenge at [xf_drabble](http://www.livejournal.com/~xf_drabble). It turned out to be anything *but* a drabble.

"C-cold. So c-c-cold .."

Her voice was barely a whisper in the throbbing depths of the ship. He stared for a second, horrified, grateful beyond belief - conscious! She was conscious!

"Hang on, Scully. I'll get you out of there." He pulled frantically at the ice surrounding her; it came out in ragged chunks that he tossed to the floor and suddenly she was falling, falling forward into his arms, naked, in a torrent of water like amniotic fluid. Alive. Her teeth chattered. God, she was so -

"C-c-c-cold."

"It's ok, Scully. It's gonna be okay." He whipped off his parka and his snow pants, pulled his extra pair of thermal socks out of his pocket. He'd freeze on the surface but she needed them more -

Mulder didn't notice the convulsions until they'd already started. He struggled to his feet and got Scully next to him as best he could. And then he felt the tremor. It was in the structure of the ship, it was in the air.

With a loud **thud** (Mulder jumped) the pod beside him cracked. He looked up - all down the line they were cracking, one after another, and far, far down in the distance there was already something - unspeakable - _looking_ at him.

God, no. No! He looked back and forth, calculated times, distances, speeds -

There was no way they'd make it out in time.

He slung Scully's quiet form over his shoulder and _ran_.

*************

Mulder turned the knobs wildly on the remaining oxygen tanks, praying he was turning them the right way, breathing with relief when he heard the telltale hiss, shoved Scully inside the transport bed and climbed in after her, pulled the top closed just _seconds_ before something that was all claws and teeth and eyes and slime _slammed_ into the side -

Mulder held his breath. The seal held.

Two more crashes - three - the vessel still held, and the thing slunk away after easier prey. He breathed again.

Outside the tiny capsule of sanity, he could hear raucous screams and cries, loud, cloying wails as though a soul was torn asunder from its body, muted through the walls of the isolation chamber. Mulder shivered, and the entire huge structure shuddered almost in perverted empathy.

"M-mulder?" Scully's eyes fluttered open. "Wha-"

"Shhh, Scully." He pulled her close against him, sharing heat. "I'm here. We'll be okay."

With all his soul, he willed truth into his voice. He watched Scully's eyes drop closed as the screaming went on, and the giant spaceship he'd invaded began to shake itself into oblivion.

**************

It might have been minutes or hours that he lay there, wrapped around Scully, watching her breath, marveling as color crept back into her face.

The screams had stopped not long after Scully closed her eyes. He supposed it hadn't been long; time seemed subjective, somehow.

In the same instant, Scully's eyes opened, and the throbbing, rattling concussion of the ship dwindled into silence.

**************

She said she thought she'd be ok. She didn't say she was fine, so he believed her. They waited until the silence became oppressive, until they couldn't think for the cotton in their ears. Then Mulder told her everything - everything he'd done since that bee in his hallway. Her eyes widened and with a gasp, her hands moved to his gunshot wound, probing, gentle, ensuring.

"It's okay." He smiled and took her hand between his. "I'm okay." Their eyes met for a second, held. She nodded.

Mulder grasped the catch for the isolation chamber. "Then what do you say we blow this popsicle stand?"

She chuckled and shook her head, which he took for a "yes." With a soft *poof* the lid came off and they were free. Mulder clambered over the side and gave her a hand up -

\- into a charnel house.

"Oh my God," Scully whispered, shrinking back toward the relative safety of the pod. Mulder could only stare.

It was death. It was all death. All around them, all through the cavernous chamber and as far down the tunnels as his eyes could see, they lay strewn like so many broken branches after a storm. Black, ichorous blood pooled beneath their grey, slimy bodies, sightless eyes coated in gelatinous, filmy death.

Everywhere. They were everywhere.

Scully recovered first. "I thought you said it was a _weak_ vaccine ...?"

Mulder shook his head wonderingly. "They don't know what they hell they've got ..."

"Come on." He grabbed her hand and pulled her along after him. "Let's get out of here."

*************

The hatch wouldn't open.

He'd banged, cajoled, twisted, shot at it - nothing. He was positive this was where he'd entered the ship. No question in his mind about that.

It simply refused every effort he put against it.

They weren't stuck. He wouldn't accept that.

Mulder pulled out his cell phone. No service.

Of course.

He slumped to the corrugated floor beside Scully and dropped his head to his knees.

He hadn't followed her to Antarctica, saved her life, only to lose them both to slow starvation and death under the ice. He _hadn't_. He wouldn't _let_ it happen.

A moment later he felt her hand on his arm. "Mulder. We're here. Let's see what we can find." And she was on her feet helping him up.

Mulder felt a surge of shame. _He_ was supposed to be the strong one; she'd just been poisoned, experimented on, imprisoned. He shook her hand off and rose on his own.

"You're right .. you're right," he breathed. "Okay. Let's go. We'll find a way."

She looked him in the eye and nodded, then picked the right-hand corridor at random and led the way. She'd changed into her old clothes from the isolation chamber, and once again wore her cross around her neck; the clack of her heels echoed reassuringly in the silence as Mulder followed her into the belly of the beast.

******************

Scully stopped short in the doorway. Mulder tensed and moved up beside her, mentally preparing himself for more gruesome bodies, half human, half alien, littering the floor as they'd seen in countless dozens of rooms just like this. _So many of them_, he thought. _So many. And so few of us._

No bodies, was the first thing his mind registered. The second was the opposite wall.

Or more precisely, the lack thereof.

It was black, pure black, deeper than the deepest black of an alien's blood. Tiny pricks of light seemed to glimmer at the edges, but disappeared when he tried to focus on them directly. Dominating the picture was a tiny, glowing, blue ball, mottled with brown and streaks of white.

It was all moving slowly, ever so slowly inching itself beyond the left wall.

Mulder's throat constricted. He could almost reach out and touch it - it was the most beautiful, precious, evocative thing he'd ever experienced. The Apollo photographs were nothing. Nothing ...

"Oh my God," Scully croaked.

_Oh, **shit**._

Scully, that .. " Mulder swallowed. "That can't be what it looks like."

She turned to him, eyes wide and breathless. She shook her head in a wordless denial.

Mulder had nothing to offer, and she took it. She turned and ran, back the way they'd come, away, far away from this impossible truth.

Mulder couldn't run. He fell to his knees and started panicking.

****************  
FOUR DAYS LATER

Scully paced the hallway outside the control room. They'd found the room on the second day, filled with instruments (luckily) labeled in English, along with quite a few boxes of hastily abandoned food, bottled water, and Morley's cigarettes. Mulder had been glued to the instrumentation for 48 hours, desperately trying to find something, anything that would start the engines again and take them home. In the end he'd had to settle for short, modulated radio signals, but even those were beginning to weaken. The artificial lights had started to dim, too ..

Scully had occupied herself in the rest of the ship, trying to find a mechanical cause. It was a small favor that the alien corpses didn't smell ... In the end, though, it hadn't been her physics degree that solved the problem.

She massaged her forehead. She didn't want to tell Mulder .. he'd been so quiet since the first day. She knew he was blaming himself, taking all the guilt and anger, subsuming it half into action and the other half to brooding. At first she'd felt vindicated - let him stew. It *was* his fault. _Everything_ was his fault, everything ...

But working alone, in the bowels of this odd ship, she'd calmed. Thanks to him, they were alive; and life was hope. She needed to tell him that, but she didn't know how to start - and this news was _not_ how she wanted to open the lines of communication.

The spaceship was biological. With the vaccine, Mulder had killed it as surely as if he'd crushed the engine of a Model T beneath his boots.

She whipped around. She couldn't. She wanted to see the Earth first. She needed to pray.

The ship was rotating at a rate of about once every two days. She didn't know the exact size of the craft, wasn't sure if the spin contributed to the obvious artificial gravity. Come to that, was it her imagination, or did she feel lighter today ....?

Anyway, if the spin hadn't slowed, the Earth should be back in view right now. Scully strode purposefully toward the observation room.

Mulder was already there, head bowed, facing the screen. Scully hovered in the doorway, not wanting to leave, not wanting to be seen.

"We're not going home," he said, without turning. "Are we." It wasn't a question.

Instantly, Scully was next to him. "You don't know that. We aren't _that_ far. Just barely outside of lunar orbit. Someone will hear your message."

He shook his head impatiently. "It's getting weaker. You _know_ that, Scully."

She didn't have an answer.

Scully licked her lips, swallowed, stared sightlessly out into space. _Literally._ She didn't appreciate the irony at all.

"This ship. It's huge. They'll come for it, they won't just -"

"The ship's dead. I killed it. It's contaminated. It has to be." He spoke briskly, hoarsely. He didn't add: they won't come.

She had no answer for that, either. She knew the lights were dimming, and the gravity ... she knew exactly how much food and water remained. She had no idea about the air, but somehow, she thought that would be the least of their worries ...

They stood like that, still, contained, separate, staring at the marble embedded in the void, for what felt an eternity.

"Scully," Mulder rasped out. She looked at him. His eyes were clenched shut, his face contorted. "I'm so, so s-"

"Mulder, don't." She touched his arm. He jumped.

Scully took a deep breath. On the count of three, she pulled his arm around her and leaned into his side, her own arms wrapping tight around his waist. She leaned her head on his chest and turned again to the window.

Instinctively, he wrapped her in his embrace.

"It's so beautiful, Mulder." She worked hard to keep the tremor from her voice. Failed. "I'm so glad I'm alive to see it with you."

He pulled her closer, starting to chuckle, and pressed his slow sad smile against the crown of her head. She felt his tears on her scalp as he murmured into her hair. "I always wanted to be an astronaut."


End file.
